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February 25, 2013

I have thought daily of my students in Kosova over the eight months since my return to the USA. Thanks to emails from Besa, Gezim, Arlind, and Ragip, the seven time zones that separate us seem a bit less immense. They all report missing me as much as I miss them, a sentiment that means more to me than they may realize; they report, too, that the research writing they did in our Twentieth-Century American Literature class has served them well in subsequent courses, particularly on their major paper on Toni Morrison.

In my next email to these four students and to their 18 colleagues, I will urge them to return to this blog, where they can reminisce with me about our six months together and, just as important, where they will discover how much they continue to influence by writing. As it turns out, this blog has served as a rough draft for a book I have written. Titled Writing Visions of Hope: Teaching Twentieth-Century American Literature and Research, the book narrates our collaborative reading and writing in these two courses. More than an account of writing-to-learn pedagogy, the book narrates my students’ stories and ties their lives to modern and contemporary literature of the Balkans as well as to the literature of America, 1901-2000. This book will appear, I’m guessing, in May or June of 2013, one year after my departure; it will be published by Information Age Publishing. I will certainly alert all my blog friends as well as my students when the book enters the world.

Additionally, the journal Pedagogy, published by Duke University Press, will soon publish an article on my work with these Kosovaran students, focusing primarily on our study of poetry. This piece, titled “Considering Claims and Finding One’s Place,” should also reach print sometime in 2013.

I also hope that my Kosovaran students will return to this blog to see how they continue to influence my teaching here at Mississippi State University. In the fall of 2012, for instance, I taught a writing course for first year students. Remembering how much my students at the University of Pristina enjoyed journaling on poetry, not only to learn how to analyze the poems but also to find personal connections to the poet’s stories, I used the same approach with these young American students, who read, among other poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” one of the poems my UP students read. Using the very same journaling prompts I assigned in Kosova, I asked my students to study the “five-haired beard of wisdom” and other figures and details that taught us to see the beauty of this grotesque fish and to hear the speaker’s joy as she decides to “let the fish go.”

But, remembering the energy of my Kosovaran students, prompted by our readings, as they narrated their lives, I asked these American students to consider writing an essay, grounded in their journaling on Bishop’s “The Fish,” that narrates one of their own experiences in the world of nature, one that changed the way they think about nature and their own place in the natural world. Many students took this option, one which produced some of the best writing of the semester. Attached, you’ll find a sample of this nature writing, Trip Kennon’s essay on “The Face of the Ozarks.”

This winter/spring semester, with philosopher Dr. John Bickle, I’m team-teaching a Humanities course for third-year undergraduates, a course that blends studies in philosophy—Dr. Bickle’s department—with readings in Western American novels focused on the Frontier experience—my department. Our students also relate their readings in philosophy and literature to classic movies on the American West: “Shane,” the 1953 film on the clashing destinies of cattle men, “sod-busters,” and loners like Shane; “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the 1962 cinema that examines frontier justice, juxtaposing the rule of the gun with the rule of law; “Hombre” (1967) and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), films that explore the tension between selfishness and self-sacrifice that informs the heroic code.

Drawing again on my experience with students at the University of Pristina, I asked my American students to keep a journal as they read our first novel, A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s The Big Sky (1947), the story of mountain man Boone Caudill, the ‘white Indian’ who ironically clears the way for westward expansion even as he flees from mid-nineteenth century American civilization east of St. Louis. For their first essay, we asked the students to “identify three characteristics that best define Boone Caudill’s character to clarify why novelist Wallace Stegner calls Boone a “doomed” hero of the frontier. What qualities strike you as heroic? What qualities undercut that heroism? How and why is Caudill doomed? Does his doom result from his heroic virtues, from his flaws, or from both? Does his doom result in part from forces exterior to his character?”

To help students to gather material for this essay, we asked them, just as I asked students in Kosova, to journal in response to analytical questions like these below, focused on Part Four of the novel, where Boone seems so happy with his Piegan wife Teal Eye, but then gets caught up in trail-blazing to Oregon and in jealousies that lead to his shooting of his dear friend Jim, the man whose life he had earlier saved from the frozen mountains:

Boone has reached the age of 29, Teal Eye 22. How would you describe the sources of Boone’s happiness in this relationship and in his life as a Piegan?

What evidence do we see here that the end draws near for Indians and for mountain men?

How, why does Boone get drawn into Peabody’s Oregon project?

Boone’s fatal choice to trail-blaze for Peabody leads to even stronger evidence of nature’s brutality and indifference to men and their “manifest destinies.” Find at least three passages that use description to develop this naturalistic theme.

What qualities in Boone stand out here as he and Jim face death by freezing and death by starvation?

Look up “pantheism” in the dictionary. Do you see any pantheism emerging here? Who seems to think most deeply about the spiritually of nature?

We see Boone’s love for Jim even after it appears that Jim has betrayed him. What sequence of bad news and mistakes leads to Boone’s suspicion of Jim? How do the causes and effects of Boone’s rage help you to understand Stegner’s notion of Boone as a “doomed” hero?

As of this writing, the students haven’t written this essay yet, but their brilliant responses to these journaling prompts, which they shared in class—just like we did in Kosova—bode well for some wonderful essays.

In addition to these undergraduate courses, I have taught two MA-level courses: in fall 2012, Writing Center Tutor Training, in spring 2013, Composition Pedagogy. Writing Center pedagogy, of course, focuses on one-on-one teaching; I went into this course with great enthusiasm, having seen conferencing work so well at UP as my students moved through three drafts of their research papers on Death of a Salesman, A Lesson Before Dying, or some other work of their choice.

I approached the Composition Pedagogy course with equal enthusiasm, remembering that many of my students in Kosova aspire to become teachers. I recalled, too, that all of my UP students responded generously to my request to interview them concerning their literacy histories, particularly as those histories relate to their memories of the 1990s wars in the Balkans and to their aspirations as students and professionals. After my American MA students had read and journaled on several articles focused on how we learn to read and write and on how we might best help students in our classrooms to develop these literacies, I asked them to write a narrative essay, focusing on their own literacy histories, on their own writing processes, or on their observations of a master writing teacher (see assignment pdf), a request preceded, of course, by rough drafting and peer response sessions—precisely the strategies that worked so well in Kosova. If you will click on the attached files, you will find the excellent responses of Kiley, Aaron, Kayleigh, Jessica and Sharon; you will also see them depicted below.

June 13-June 20, 2012

Over the last two weeks, fellow Fulbrighter Dave McTier and I have enjoyed traveling in the Balkans, a region as rich in scenery as in history.

On June 13, we made a day trip to Peja (Peć), about 90 minutes west of Pristina, just east of Montenegro. As you’ll see in the photos, this area features the Rugova valley and some of the most spectacular mountains in Kosova.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Then on June 19, we took a bus to Skopje, Macedonia, where we followed winding stone streets to specialty shops, produce markets, and film festivals; we also sampled several of the hundreds of out-door coffee shops. Macedonia’s capital also boasts a town center with huge new government buildings and countless statues celebrating the conquests of Philip and his son, Alexander the Great.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Dave McTier with fellow bus passengers

The next day, we boarded another bus for Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. En route, we marveled at Macedonia’s countryside, stunningly mountainous and green. Once over the Bulgarian border, we saw more mountains but also frequent grim reminders of the Soviet era, small towns filled with dilapidated, boxy grey buildings, abandoned factories, squalid apartment buildings, and shacks.

The outskirts of Sophia reveal the same signs of poverty and displacement, but, as you will see in the photos, the inner city features grand government buildings, archeological museums, and innumerable mosques and Orthodox churches. As do other houses of worship in Europe, these offer rich iconography celebrating the faith-narratives of the past, but these shrines attract active believers, not just tourists.

**Click on the first picture below to scroll through the gallery images in a larger, “slideshow” format.**

Orthodox church

Grand Hotel

Russian Orthodox Church

Russian Orthodox Church

Rich, the expat

Orthodox church

Street musicians

Smurfs?

National Theatre

Bulgaria-Macedonia border

For more historical details, please visit Dave McTier’s blog posts for Peja & Rugova as well as Sofia.

I have been blessed with wonderful students at the University of Pristina. They and their families suffered so much in the 90s, and now they lead impossibly complicated lives as they juggle commitments to family and to jobs. But they still make time for MA studies and remain sweet tempered and hopeful about the future.

After our last classes, the Monday/Thursday students and the Saturday students took me to coffee, a fine old Albanian tradition. I offer these pics as proof that they like me! The ‘student’ sitting on my lap (my wife Judy) likes me most of all😉.

June 3, 2012

Njerëz Me Shpresa Të Thyera, or “Men with Broken Hopes,” is a play that tells the story of soldiers returning from Vietnam in 1970. My Fulbright colleague Dave McTier directed his senior male students in this, their “diploma production.” I loved their performances of these troubled young men.

Please visit Dave’s blog to read the full details and see pictures of how he and his students brought this play to life.

Below are a few snapshots from the performance I attended. One of the pictures features director Dave McTier with the author, Shaip Grabovci, and his wife.

May 5, 2012

I began the next session by returning students’ papers on A Lesson before Dying, congratulating them on their solid work, and inviting them to meet me during office hours if they had questions about my comments and their grades.

Returning to our discussion of King’s letter, I said that effective logos, the substance of any argument, requires more than presenting evidence in support of a claim, that it requires leading the reader through the evidence toward a conclusion, using deductive and inductive methods of reasoning. To begin demonstrating the inter-connectedness of the deductive and inductive processes, I referred them to three sentences on the board, quoted below, each extracted from King’s fifteenth paragraph, the one alluding to Martin Buber and Paul Tillich and their condemnation of segregation as sinful. Together, the three sentences, I said, represent a syllogism, a three-part deductive statement:

Major Premise: All laws that degrade the human personality are unjust.

Minor Premise: Segregation laws degrade the human personality.

Conclusion: Segregation laws are unjust.

All syllogisms, I explained, begin with a major premise, a generalization about a class or genus—all laws—a premise that King rightly assumes his primary audience, the clergymen, will accept without challenge. The minor premise, I continued, then makes a generalization about a member or species of that group, “segregation laws,” asserting that they “degrade the human personality”; therefore, the deductive logic runs, if the major premise is true, and if the minor premise is true, then it necessarily follows that all segregation laws are unjust.

“But where,” I continued, “has King provided his proof—beyond these allusions to Jewish and Christian theologians—that supports the minor premise, that segregation laws ‘degrade the personality’?” Hearing no response, I referred the students to King’s fourteenth paragraph, where King presents abundant and passionate evidence that “segregation laws degrade the personality,” and he does so, I explained, by using inductive logic, which begins with an hypothesis, then moves through a series of experiments or examples to confirm or contradict the hypothesis. I then referred the students to the inductive outline of King’s fourteenth paragraph, which answers the clergymen’s question about waiting for freedom and, in so doing, tests the hypothesis about the degrading effect of segregation:

Hypothesis: Segregation laws degrade the personality.

Results of Testing Hypothesis:

Experiment #1: “Vicious mobs” lynch your family members.

Experiment #2: “Hate-filled policemen…kick…brothers and sisters.”

Experiment #3: Twenty million African Americans live in an “airtight cage of poverty.”

Experiment #4: African American children are excluded from amusement parks, and fathers have no explanation.

Experiment #5: African American adults are barred from motels.

Experiment #6: African American women and men are never accorded respect, never called by their names; they suffer, therefore, a “degenerating sense of nobodiness.”

Conclusion: Segregation laws degrade the human personality.

After reviewing this inductive process, I asked the students to note that the inductive conclusion becomes the minor premise for King’s syllogism two paragraphs later. This blending, I said, quoting from Questioning,

shows that our minds work inductively, helping us interpret to experience, and that our minds also work deductively, helping us to reason from our discovered premises to further conclusions. Persuasive writing…makes transparent this blending of inductive and deductive thought. To put it negatively, had Dr. King omitted paragraph 14, with all its examples—proofs—of the damaging effect of segregation laws, then his minor premise in paragraph 16, that segregation laws damage the personality, would be a logical fallacy. That is, King would have been guilty of begging the question, the fallacy of assuming as proven the very idea that needs to be demonstrated. (156-57)

This blending of induction and deduction, I continued, also further strengthens King’s ethos, as “he offers his readers cool logic and sound evidence to persuade them that they cannot ask his followers to ‘wait’ any longer for freedom” (157).

Finally, I asked the class to recall King’s deliberative purpose, to advise the clergymen and all Americans to guarantee the country’s ‘enduring and prevailing’ by rising to its high ideals of brotherhood. Such a purpose, I said, moves him away from judicial discourse, away from accusing and defending, and toward meditational discourse, striving “to bridge the gap between ‘you,’ the clergymen who have criticized him and the racists who have jailed him, and ‘we,’ the victims of segregation”(157).

To support this claim, I asked the students to consider one more sentence on the board, a line rich with parallel rhythms and imbedded figurative language that, together, help us hear and see his vision of unity as he praises blacks and whites working together:

They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

By juxtaposing these contrasting images, I said, King not only praises those who have carved the “tunnel of hope” but also invites his critics and those “white moderates” to join in the carving. We see this invitation again in his last sentence, where he urges all his readers to share his hope that “in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.” As noted in Questioning, “by saving this inspiring image for the end of his letter, the point where he hopes to have won supporters, not vanquished opponents, King has shown that arrangement works together with parallelism and metaphoric language to move his readers toward embracing a positive common destiny” (158).

As we neared the end of the session, I reminded the class that our next meeting would focus on an excerpt from John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, another passionate call for justice and ‘prevailing’ through unity. Neihardt, I explained, was a white poet from Nebraska, but his book grew from extended interviews with Black Elk, a holy man of the Lakota tribe, whose vision of tribal and world unity died in 1890 at the Battle of Wounded Knee, where the US Calvary crushed rebellious Native American tribes. From the point of view of the US government, I further explained, Wounded Knee affirmed the doctrine on “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that God ordained white people to move always westward, acquiring land by purchase or by force so that the nation could grow and prosper economically.

However, I continued, from the Native Americans’ point of view, the US government committed genocide at Wounded Knee, a crime made even worse by herding Indians onto reservations, essentially concentration camps, places where Indian culture died and survivors felt utterly broken in spirit, which explains the extremely high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide on reservations, then and now.

We would read another excerpt for the next meeting, I noted, this one from N. Scott Momaday’s book The Way to Rainy Mountain. Another Native American with Kiowa and Cherokee blood, Momaday, I said, wrote his book in celebration of Kiowa culture, a culture also crushed when the US Army forced them onto the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and deprived them of their Sun Dance, their religion.

Finally, as they read these works, I asked the students to keep Kings’ “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in mind and to reflect on what the three works have in common as protests of injustice and as pleas for unity. “And think of historical patterns in these passionate writings, too,” I said, noting that Neihardt recorded Black Elk’s vision in 1932, when King was a small child, and that Momaday wrote about the fate of the Kiowas in 1969, one year after King was assassinated. To help them find a personal focus for their reflections, I distributed the following journaling prompts, asking student to pick one and to fill up at least a page of their journals in response:

Describe a holy man or woman from your culture that you have found inspiring.

What feelings do you have as a Kosovaran as you read about a vision that strives to avoid genocide?

May 23-30, 2012

The following pictures are from various sites and Judy and I visited in and around Pristina while she was here. She even required a police escort at one point (in truth, the law officers were just as curious as she was to see what was behind the locked gate).

May 2 & 9, 2012

Mark Lake, Educational Director for the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention

Mark Lake is a fellow American in Kosova. He is the Educational Director with the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. As part of his program, Lake offers English conversation courses for students at the American Corner.

I joined his class on May 2 and 9 to lead them in a discussion about Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy.” For the first class, we met at their usual place, the American Corner in the National Library on the University of Pristina campus. For the gathering on the 9th, we met at local park instead because the library was closed in observance of Europe Day.

**Click on the first image to view pictures in a larger, “slideshow” format.

May 2: Discussing Lahiri’s Sexy with Mark Lake’s students at the American Corner

May 9: Discussing Lahiri’s Sexy with Mark Lake’s students at a local park

April 25, 2012

Dave and I traveled today by cab about 20 minutes south of Pristina, where we found a village, Gračanica, home of the 14th-century Orthodox Christian monastery commissioned by Serbian King Milutin in 1321. It still offers services twice daily and houses an order of orthodox nuns.

I’ve attached some photos of the exterior. Photography is not allowed inside the monastery, so the images of the frescos are from Wikipedia.